Sublime

As Herzl was writing in German in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the best-known Jew in the English-speaking world was Israel Zangwill.

Yavetz was but one of a number of writers shaping the Yishuv. Another, who became a leading writer not only of the Yishuv but of the Western world, was Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Czaczkes,

He published the work under his recently adopted pseudonym, Shai Agnon.18 In 1966, he would win Israel’s first Nobel Prize.

The first book of modern Hebrew literature in the Yishuv was written by Ze’ev Yavetz, who moved to Palestine in 1887. Deeply unsettled by those immigrants who seemed insufficiently committed to re-creating the Jew, he used his sharp pen to attack those who he felt failed to appreciate that the decision to come to Palestine ought to flow from a pass